Excerpt: Untitled

I dismissed Stella’s reaction, figuring that she wasn’t worth my time. After school Roxy and I sat under the sycamore tree, her large sketch tablet propped up between her knees.
“Stop twitching,” she said. “Did you know you twitch when you write? Well stop. My iconic memory can’t keep track of your changes.”
“Iconic memory?” I muttered, my eyes downcast, focusing on my notebook. I was writing down everything that was going on, from my bodily functions to the actions of the old couple walking by, who gave Roxy a patronizing stare for the maze tattoo on her arm.
“Yes,” she said, slapping her pencil on the table. “Iconic memory. A perfect picture in your head, that retains everything you see in its original shape and form, like a photograph.”
“A photograph?” I said. “Like photographic memory?”
“Yes, except it’s gone in about a quarter of a second.”
“What happens then?”
“Well,” Roxy says, nibbling at the edge of her pencil, “it then becomes altered and changed. Human memory isn’t perfect, Isaak. It twists and contorts memories over time so what you think you remember is almost part of your imagination. Turn you head.”
I continued to pen, scratching my prose into the ruled paper.
“But what about those memories, you know, from your childhood,” I said. “Those vivid recollections of your first kiss, your first pet dog, you know, important stuff.”
“Sorry,” she shrugged. “Those aren’t immune either. We tend to idealize, to shape people and things into the way we want to see it. Turn your head. And anyway, what do you remember about your first kiss?”
“I haven’t had one,” I told her.
“What?” she said, breaking her gaze from her tablet to raise an eyebrow at me. “No playground fun from the great Isaak Davis?”
“Not that I’d like to think about,” I said. What I told her was the truth. I didn’t feel ashamed about it, so much as a little disappointed in myself. Three years into high school and still no kiss. “There a better things to think about than when I’ll get to lock lips with someone.” Roxy shrugged, and continued to sketch. My mind wandered, and for a few minutes, my writing hand paused.
I wasn’t a big fan of romantic things. My lack of romantic experience, though derided, have never hindered me from speaking with girls. After all, Roxy was my best, albeit only, friend. But maybe I was missing something, I thought, something that would give me new experiences in order to jog my mind and my pen. Something that midnight bike rides would never awaken.
“Here we go,” Roxy said, flipping the board to show me her work. It was a three-quarters rendering of my face, looking down to the point where my eyes looked closed. There was sun shining through the leaves of the sycamore, dappling my features with spots of light and shades of gray.
“Wonderful impressionism. Thanks for doing me the favor of making me look like a Che Guevara-esque, angsty male model,” I said.
“Now come on,” she said, resentful over the Monet snipe. “I think this is a pretty accurate representation of you. Cleared up a bit of the acne, but in essence we’ve got Isaak.”
“It looks like my dad when he was younger,” I said. Roxy didn’t reply. I looked up mid-verse of a new poem.
“What’s up?”
“You never talk about your dad, Isaak,” she muttered gravely.
“Not usually,” I mumbled. “But today got me thinking about it. In English, we’ve got to write this essay on the excesses of addiction.”
“Well then, you should be able to do just fine,” Roxy said, “considering you can speak from a point of experience.”
“It’s not a point I want to bring up though, Roxy,” I sighed. “I’m still grappling with it in my brain, on my own paper. I’m not ready to show people.”
“You show me,” she said.
“Yeah, but I show you everything,” I said. “My dad’s death still isn’t something I can juice out into a best seller. God, I sometimes wonder…”
“What?”
“I wonder whether I’ll end up like him.” I pressed the pen to my lips, thinking. “I wonder if I were to ever slip up, become addicted to something like, I dunno, uppers, downers, booze, air freshener—I don’t know, something! If I were to ever get addicted, whether or not I’d fall apart like my dad did.”
“I don’t think addictive personality runs in the family,” Roxy said. “Besides, your addiction is writing, if you haven’t noticed. You couldn’t possibly have room for another that interfered with that one.”
“But most psychoactive drugs don’t interfere with writing,” I reasoned, “ or anything, for that matter. I mean, Lewis Carroll, the man who wrote Alice and Wonderland, was almost certainly experimenting with drugs.”
“You’d have to be on drugs to think up talking caterpillars smoking hookas and white rabbits in tailcoats,” Roxy remarked.
“And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character, Sherlock Holmes the Detective, was always using snuff and cocaine in order to keep his mind stimulated. Heck, even great psychologists like Sigmund Freud did crack.”
“Isaak,” Roxy sighed, “I’m going to have to go all poetic on you for a second to get it into your head. One man’s muse is another man’s kryptonite.” She slipped the picture of me into her bag and packed up her supplies. For someone like Roxy, whose hair color changed as often as her opinions and whose skin was permanently dyed with the doodles of the day, she could be awfully straight-edge when she wanted to.
“Understood,” I said, closing my own creative medium and getting up from the ground. The slightly damp soil have left a darkened imprint on my jeans. I brushed of the dirt and slung my bag onto my shoulders. My bike, a rickety old contraption, stood leaning on its kickstand a few feet away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I told her.
“Same time, same place as usual,” Roxy nodded, giving me a casual salute with her hand to her forehead. I mounted my bicycle and pedaled off to my house.